Hi,
I have to decide whether I want to study Computer science in University of Glasgow or Edinburgh. Usually I would choose Edinburgh but since Glasgow has come ahead of Edinburgh in recent league tables, I am a bit confused. What do you think about which uni is better?
Another thing I learned recently is that Glasgow's course is practically-oriented while Edinburgh's is theoretically oriented. Do you have an opinion on this?
Thanks for spending time on my post

League tables are a very dodgy measure of university ranking. They change drastically from year to year, and for Computer Science at Edinburgh, very few students actually respond to the student survey which is used as a big factor in the league rankings (CS department actually has the lowest response rate out of all departments at the uni). So those rankings are especially flawed when considering Edinburgh.

Glasgow's course may teach and have you do more practical things, but not by a large margin. This is because Edinburgh is a world-leading research university and some of the courses focus more on concepts - there are many that are entirely theoretical. It is possible however to take a more practical course schedule while at Edinburgh, especially in your final years where for example you could do a module that has you work with robots and electronics to build deployable software.

In terms of which is 'better', this is usually going to be defined by the general consensus around the UK, Europe, and the world, where Edinburgh simply wins. Let's look at quantitative data from a national survey of all computing research in the UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/...nd-informatics

Edinburgh has over three times the amount of staff carrying out research in Computer Science. It wins not only in quantity but also in quality as a higher proportion of researcher are ranked as carrying out world leading research. These results come from an independent study carried out over many years, and have been used to allocate research for funding.

If you do choose Edinburgh, do be warned as the course can get quite hard. Unfortunately, most of the students who do drop out from Informatics tend to be Scottish - of the students I know that dropped out during my course, about 6 of 8 were Scottish. I'm not sure why this is, but it's happening enough to be notable.